


I'm Hoping One Day Acting Cool Will Make Me Feel Self-Assured

by v00doll



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Friendship/Love, Gen, Kanaya-centric, Multi, Quadrant Confusion, Self-Worth Issues, long furby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:28:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24813070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/v00doll/pseuds/v00doll
Summary: You're learning to be honest with yourself about how much you really don't care. You're learning to choose what's better for you, and even if that means taking the easy way out a lot of the time, so be it. You're no one's mother.
Relationships: (Pale) Kanaya Maryam/Vriska Serket, Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam, Terezi Pyrope/Vriska Serket
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	I'm Hoping One Day Acting Cool Will Make Me Feel Self-Assured

**Author's Note:**

> Just. Kanaya brainrot. That's all it is. I love her. 
> 
> Wrote most of this at 2am. Mostly unedited because I poured all my energy into the other fic i published earlier today so please be forgiving.
> 
> Also!! Title is lyrics from The Tender Surrender by Eat Babies. I saw a kanaya edit set to that song and it was just perfect.

Your name is Kanaya Maryam and you are Very Helpful. 

It’s simply who you are and what you do. You help your friends. No matter how much anyone may call it “meddling” you know, deep down, that you’re helping them. Because, as established, you are very helpful.

You help your friends because you  _ like  _ to help your friends. You like making them happy and even more than that, you like knowing that you know better than them, know what’s better for them. You like giving people relationship advice that  _ you know _ makes them angry or frustrated because  _ you know  _ it’s because of you that said relationship has even lasted so long in the first place! It’s a backwards way of making them know you care, you suppose. Like Troll Pavlov and his barkbeasts. You “fuss” and then wait for things to work out so that next time, they know they can count on you to “fuss” enough to make things work out. You tidy up Vriska’s hive a little bit, despite her protests, so that she knows you care, so that she trusts you. (And okay  _ maybe  _ you play up the fussy, worried caretaker angle a little because you know that she’ll find it pathetic. Maybe even pitiable?) And she does! It’s you she asks to make that cute little dress. 

...And then once she has it, to be promptly ignored. For... 

...

...

She doesn’t pity you. 

_ Kanaya, it’s hard. Being a kid and growing up. It’s hard and nobody understands. _

But it’s okay, because even if there are holes in matching shapes in both the span of white fabric on your floor and in your blood-pusher’s smaragdine wall, even if you allow your voice a bit of bitterness when Vriska approaches you on the meteor, you don’t do this in hopes of flushed attention. You do this because you like to help your friends.

  
  


\---

Very few of your friends understand the concept of “motherhood” or have even heard the word, but it  _ haunts  _ you. Your Lusus, a Virgin  _ Mother _ Grub, left behind her true purpose to raise you. Left behind a life spent spawning brood after brood of grubs to raise one, abandoned the creation of many to ensure the survival of a singular. To  _ help  _ you grow. It is an honour. And when she dies and you have to fill your end of the bargain, you will be the one who ensures that your race will live on. She has sacrificed a life of infinite motherhood in order to pass it onto you. 

But is that what motherhood means? Birthing? Is it the act of spawning that makes one a mother, or the process of  _ mothering  _ that spawn? You drive yourself crazy night after night -because you’re diurnal, unlike all your friends- pondering the merits of a technical definition versus an adopted meaning that  _ feels  _ more correct. Bluh!

\---

You are Very Helpful, and Rose Lalonde needs all the help she can get. 

Her strange human lusus-type adult -whose name and role you later learn are both, quite appropriately considering the context and medium of this particular string of words,  _ Mom _ \- does very clearly care for her an awful lot, but she is equally evidently too inebriated the majority of the time to properly raise her. Perhaps as a result, or perhaps simply because Roses are naturally thorny, Rose grows up prickly and snide and saturated with a deep, hungry, volatile anger that she hides cleverly behind purple text and purple prose interwoven with digs at the ego/intellect/intent/sexuality of whoever she’s speaking to. She also grows up deeply unsatisfied with life. Nothing that happens ever seems to do anything but irritate her, and you find yourself  _ yearning  _ for more of those rare moments when she does something pointless and silly. Truly, most of what she does is silly, however serious her natural dourness makes it seem, but it is the pointlessness that’s the rarity, and it’s the pointlessness you crave. The W moustache? You had hearts in your eyes already. The whole charade with dressing that cute little salamander in wizard’s robes? You almost cried.

But you’re going off on a tangent the length of which would almost put Rose herself to shame. The point of what you were saying was that Rose Lalonde was a fucking disaster. 

Since the whole fiasco with Tavros’ legs cooled down and there hadn’t been any use for your chainsaw and disturbing enthusiasm in the face of veritable tidal waves of blood, you’d been functionally useless. Not to say worthless, you’d never quantify your worth based on how useful you are to others, or the importance of the task you’re working towards -right?- but in essence you hadn’t had a lot on your serving disc. You felt kind of weird then. Untethered. You had a goal: get the matriorb to do its thing, but no clue how to accomplish it, no time constraint, no starting point, basically you had hit a dead end. The only person you could possibly help in any way was  _ Rose.  _

There was the minor issue, though, of her not wanting to be helped by anyone in any way ever, and her general disdain for you personally.

She didn’t want to do her quest, so there was no way for you to help her get ahead on that with what minimal knowledge you had on Cetus. She didn’t want idle conversation laced with “meddling” undertones, or conversation of any kind. For all her talk about “pushing the game to its limits, seeing just how far it can be pushed before it breaks, just how much damage can be done before the code seizes up” or something along those lines, all Rose r _ eally w _ anted was to wreck shit. There was no way for you to help this girl. 

You could watch her though. Watch her break the game in as many ways as she could, ignoring the information it gave her and smugly burgaluring the information it tried to hide, burning down the walls of her “myth-heavy rat maze” to run wild in the rest of the lab. You watched her be violent and angry and moody and dull and isolate herself and not succumb to, but  _ reach for  _ the power of the gods of the furthest ring. Watched her explode. 

Seeing her anger made you angry too. Angry that she was blowing you off constantly and insulting you when she did deem you worthy of the time of day, sure, but also angry in general. At the world, you supposed, though the words “the world” held little meaning if any at all anymore. You’ve been angry before plenty of times, but your anger is searing hot and white like the sun when you stare too long, and it always settles back down to a faint glow and then nothing at all. Rose’s anger is a pulse that thrums in her chest constantly, inextinguishable. You wondered for a while how awful, how  _ exhausting  _ it must be to be so perpetually enraged deep inside with no outlet for that fury.

You think you might know now?

You help people because you  _ like  _ to. You  _ like  _ to help your friends. Sure, you may be frustrated when you keep helping time and time again with no result, or hurt when nobody wants your help anyway, but you  _ like to help.  _ Really. You work your ass off for your friends. Sure, tidying a room only takes a few clicks of a mouse, and sure, you’re a sewing genius anyway, and sure, you think yourself the go-to for romantic advice even though you’re intentionally ignoring the actual romantic drama taking place all around you -because it’s confusing and that scares you- and telling yourself that you’re waiting for them to come to you, but it takes a lot out of you -despite how much you  _ like _ it- which makes it hard work.

\---

You are Very Helpful.

And you have no clue what to do.

Eridan’s wand glows searing hot and white like sunlight when you’ve been staring too long, but the glow continues after the wand ends. The matriorb -your entire  _ purpose and reason for being _ \- explodes at your feet and falls in a sickly lump of moisture and shattered spikes on the floor. Your vision swims, your stomach drops, your pulse thuds against the backs of your eyes,  _ Vengeance,  _ cries every cell in your body, and you are quite inclined to obey.

You are dead before you hit the floor. Your chainsaw lies dormant where you drop it, the floor around you bleaches emerald. It hurts, it hurts so badly, but, dead, you don’t even have the energy to grasp at the wound. You don’t even have the energy to tell Karkat to  _ shut up for gog’s sake, it’s too loud, you’re too loud, everything is too loud and too much and it  _ **_hurts._ ** You just lie there, waiting for the quiet. It doesn’t take long. The room empties quickly.

In the quiet, you can hear someone else’s pulse where yours was mere minutes ago.

_ Mother  _ is the first word in her name, and the first word that you think, and it’s fitting because that is what she has done. She has mothered you, given you life. A second time, now. It’s weak, though, you couldn’t stomach very much blood back in your sunny yard. It was frankly gross. Your tongue remembers the salt, the iron, the copper, the indescribable flavour of cool, deep green. Bluh! It was just so awful.

Your think pan remembers this, at least.

Your tongue and stomach and arteries, however,  _ crave _ . 

And Feferi, may she rest in peace, is looking like a whole meal right now.

\---

Blood really isn’t as gross as you remember. Tasty even! Maybe that’s because you survive off of it now, but minor details.

\---

You are Very Angry.

After binding your wound and wandering about the meteor searching for corpses to drain -in any other situation you’d be horrified by the sheer number of corpses available for any purpose, but in this case your disgust is mixed with gratitude- you managed to find just the trio you were looking for.

The girl that killed the boy she once rejected you for.

The boy that made not one but two of the corpses you’ve...uh...come across. 

And the boy that not only killed you and your friend, but your potential, your purpose, and your hope of progeny. 

You know that we all already know how it happens, but you’re inclined to describe the events in intricate and lurid detail anyway because it was just so badass.

You punted the corpsemaker clown off the roof like the sad sack of trash that he was. The gravity on the meteor was weird and unreliable most of the time, but watching him sail into the dark, infinite sky, you were quite satisfied. His shades -not his, you realised- hovered momentarily as he plummeted back to the ground several floors below and you turned on Vriska with a punch that made something c _ rack _ . She flew back several feet and skidded on the ground while you whirled to face Eridan.

You took the precaution, this time around, of snapping his stupid dumb fucking wand.

The whirr of the chainsaw matched the rumble of anger in your chest, starting a low, simmering resent and growing in seconds to white-hot rage that you screamed into the endless night as you tore through him, blind to the tidal wave of sweet, rich violet blood that his flailing torso graciously released. His halves flopped like fish out of water on the floor for a few seconds as your chest heaved.

The shades fell perfectly into place on your eyes. You allowed yourself a small taste of the blood on your ch-lipstick. 

It was awesome.

It was exhausting. 

You don’t know how long you waited to wander off and collapse after the whole ordeal, but you did. Being angry takes so much energy. Even if you were still mad, deep down, long after you had left the scene, the tiredness outweighed the fury. 

\---

You think to yourself later that even then, you were the one pushing the cogs, and it makes you even angrier. Helping or hurting, you are  _ always  _ the one making shit take place. It’s just who you are. You’re the responsible one. It is so tiring.

\---

A lot happened in a very short time, and then for the very long period of time that followed, a whole lot of nothing got accomplished. You filled the void by searching for Gamzee with the intent of familiarizing him with the business end of your chainsaw -which is every end. Your chainsaw has many ends, and every one means business.- but that was put to an end by Vriska stuffing him in a fridge to spare Terezi a mountain of personal issues that you don’t understand and don’t want to. You really don’t care.

You’re getting better at that. Being honest about how much you don’t care.

Because wow! Most of the time, you really don’t! You’re equal parts amused and embarrassed by the memories of a younger Kanaya who wanted nothing more than to meddle and pry into everyone’s business under the guise of trying to help them. You expended so much energy doing nothing but frustrating your friends and yourself, and you still do waste your energy, sure, but you’re learning to waste it on things that actually concern you. 

Like your date tonight!

\---

She’s late for the date. Not fashionably late -though you’ve given up trying to convince yourself that you’re an expert- but late by literal  _ hours.  _ Any sane person would have left much earlier, but you remain.  _ Maybe she’s just nervous,  _ you tell yourself. You are an idiot.

A correct idiot though, as it turns out. Rose looks both thoroughly inebriated and thoroughly guilty by the time you  _ finally  _ get sick of w8ing (bluh!) and come looking for her, though that might be mostly because Vriska is stomping on the shards of a broken mug and yelling at her that she should feel guilty. You’re touched. Maybe she’s repaying the million favours from years ago that you both know she doesn’t actually care about repaying, or maybe the pity you saw in her eyes when you clocked her jaw sideways wasn’t just momentary and she -gog forbid- genuinely cares about you, but there is little time for speculation when Vriska and Rose both turn to face you with expressions of matching guilt. 

You look at Rose, and you don’t see a girl whose anger has finally exhausted her and who is left with nothing but nerves that she’s tried to numb with her weird, icky human soporific. You just see a pretty girl that used to be mean and snarky but who now looks young and guilty and it makes pity swell in your chest. 

You look at Vriska and you see your friend who cares about you.

\---

It occurs to you about a week later that that was the first time since your collective arrival on the meteor that the first thought you had when looking at Vriska wasn’t about how much she hurt you or others.

\---

Another thing that occurs to you later is that as deep as Rose’s facade of indifference, coldness, and general snarky horseshit goes, it is still that: a facade, and at her core she is just a weird, silly girl. 

You ponder this while gazing at her as she’s napping on your chest, a portable husktop open to a story she’s writing -about a blue hedgehog and his secret lover: a black and red hedgehog on the other side of the war he fights in a magical underwater city- on her lap. This happens after your first date, but before you’ve started properly  _ dating _ . Her hair fans out over your shirt, mostly pale, but dark where her roots are starting to grow back in. Her chest rises and falls slowly and her body is limp, even her face, usually so stiff. She’s just barely smiling, and you’re inclined to smile yourself. Must be nice to be able to let yourself sleep without the fear of morbid visions plaguing you every time your eyes start to close. Even though dreambubbles are a thing now and you typically can’t dream anything much worse than a few hours of wandering an eclectic yet endearing amalgamation of dead memories and occasionally talking to alternate ghosts of your friends, the trauma from life on alternia when sopor was the only way to sleep without dreaming a hotbed of body horror remains. There’s no sopor on the meteor, so those of your original dozen that remain have taken on the human habit of sleeping on furniture and piles of soft things, like the pile of your scrap fabric and Rose’s abandoned knittingss that the two of you lie on now. 

This room has been appointed as your shared workroom. Even though almost anything can be created via alchemy now, you like the satisfaction of being able to bring something together under your hands. Rose does not usually share this sentiment, but came in here one night/day/whatever with a manic look in her eyes and an idea for a project she wanted your help with, so this is where you’ve both been working on it.

The project in question stares at you with eyes full of love and terror from the corner where his head lies on a table, surrounded by the empty, flopping husk that will be his body when Rose decides it’s long enough and starts stuffing it. Most of the parts were alchemized, but the two of you have been putting him together by hand.

Rose calls him a long furby. You call him a god’s mistake.

Absently, you find yourself smiling too and running your fingers through her hair, slowly, softly, gently scratching at her scalp with your long and pointed nails. 

She stirs, brows knitting.

“Wha?” she slurs through sleep. 

“Shhh,” you coax her.

She lazily swats your hand away from her head and rolls over, earning a small “oof” from you, to lie fully on top of you and wrap her arms around your waist. “Don’t do that,” she yawns “Just be here.”

You just be here.

\---

You and Terezi bond briefly over your mutual fondness and exasperation for Vriska, but ultimately, they’re their own little duo and you don’t think you or anyone will ever really be able to understand what they have together well enough to be part of it. They’re so impossibly codependent that even knowing their new relationship falls into the pale quadrant, you’re reluctant to try to rekindle anything red with Vriska because it would feel like encroaching on territory that’s already happily filled. Honestly, which of Vriska’s quadrants  _ hasn’t  _ Terezi been in? 

The red one, Vriska confides in you one day, which shocks you for two reasons.  _ One,  _ because “confiding” is a display of affection typically only engaged in with one’s moirail, which you are not, despite the heat in your cheeks.  _ Two,  _ because you really thought it was the ashen one. Not only are they such a solid and clear unit of two that you can’t  _ imagine  _ a third party in the equation, but the way they look at each other, the way they talk to each other, is just so...  _ undeniably red  _ that even if they’re perfectly content as moirails, they’ve definitely at least  _ thought  _ about going concupiscent. You don’t think of any of this at the time, though. You just ask her if she  _ wants _ Terezi in her red one and she just chuckles and looks a little nervous. She doesn’t think she’s ready for a concupiscent relationship right now, she tells you, and you agree. She takes this as the friendly insult you meant and punches you in the shoulder and proceeds to bug you for an hour about  _ your  _ quadrants. Which are all empty.

Karkat had, some weeks ago,  _ tried  _ to pursue moirailligience with you, but you’d declined. He was just too good a friend, and you didn’t want to risk things being weird after the inevitable breakup, you’d told him. You didn’t tell him that you know he already has a lot on his plate and could see yourself subconsciously growing more passive, going back to someone who only ever wanted to help  _ others _ , and you were trying to grow back some of your self-respect after the year you’d spent realizing things about yourself. 

Some weird romantic bullshit is going on now, but you’re too nervous to interact with any of it, so you take the easy way out and pretend you don’t care how any of it ends up.

It does all end up well though, you’re happy to report.

\---

That speech Rose gave you on the stairs that time about “wanting a _ lllll _ your quadrants” turned out to be more than simply drunken flirting. She has made a genuine attempt to gain a well-developed understanding of your culture’s quadrants and an equally genuine but much less graceful attempt to flirt with you in every one.

For your part, you’ve gleaned that human romance is much simpler than the kind you’re used to, and ask her to be your girlfriend, partially to accommodate the kind of pity -or rather, love- that she’d find easier to understand and experience, as a show of how much you care, and mostly to get her to stop trying to get at your black quadrants because her poor comprehension of kismessitude is embarrassing even to you, who thought for some of your wriggler years that it included platonic hate and cried because you thought that meant you would have to kiss the boy in the online sewing forum who called you a bitch.

She accepts, of course.

While your relationship is technically not in any quadrant, and if anything, mirrors matespriteship more than any other (which is a disgustingly simple way of defining the nature of either relationship but that’s fine, whatever) you still start rejecting Vriska’s subtle pale flirting. Not only does she already have a moirail (even if you’ve caught them kissing which is a decidedly red display of affection) but you’re just kind of... not feeling it anymore? It’s complicated. Your feelings for her didn’t disappear, but you’re comfortable with just being her friend while you and your girlfriend build the long furby you’re arguing over a name for.

\---

A lot of nothing happens for a long, long time, and then suddenly everything happens. You’re forced to confront your issues with the idea of motherhood yet again.

It’s not that the idea disgusts you. What disgusts you is yourself and the idea thereof, and with the two concepts so strongly associated in your mind, that disgust for your inclination to waste time and energy fawning over someone else bleeds over into disgust for the idea of one’s role being that of someone’s caretaker. You don’t hate the idea of motherhood. It’s precious to you. You want to love it with the same fierceness that you used to.

But that’s really hard when remembering how much you used to love it only reminds you of how hurt and exhausted running around after people made you. 

You can feel your heart sink at echidna’s “words”. Even now, the final boss, the final battle, after all that fucking growth, you’re demoted once again to someone’s protector. He’s your friend -your  _ very best friend,  _ even if you don’t think you’re his anymore- and of course you care about him and want him to live, but you will  _ not _ be reduced to his shield. You’ve always had a strong sense of responsibility, but you’re learning to be honest with yourself about your own wants and needs. 

So you do what you do best and take the easy way out, in this case by bonking him on the head and leaving him behind. For his own good.

\---

The sky arches above you, dark and infinite. Around you, violet spires curl to pierce it. You wear death like armour, both your own and the ones you’ve caused, and your chainsaw purrs in your hand like the promise of blood that it is. 

Beating up a “8ig 8ad” is always good stress relief.

**Author's Note:**

> Some potential names for Kanaya and Rose's long furby:
> 
> -Big Juicy  
> -Helen Otis  
> -Vlad  
> -Rainboy  
> -Milf Destroyer  
> -Reanimated Reaganomix  
> -What the Hell is That Thing  
> -Dreamwave  
> -Psychedelica  
> -Edgar Allen Poser  
> -Troll Edgar Allen Poser  
> -Lord Amaranth of Tit Valley  
> -Sweetmeat  
> -Jellyfish James
> 
> Comment your favourite, or other suggestions!!


End file.
